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On Monday, I tweeted my prediction of yesterday's announcement concerning the Higgs boson: "Predicting the future: tomorrow we will find out that there may be some sign of the Higgs boson, but more tests are needed."

That's pretty much exactly what CERN announced yesterday. The Large Hadron Collider has definitely found some indications that the Higgs Boson may exist, but further tests are needed in order to confirm a discovery.

This isn't to say that nothing has been found. Indeed, the CERN results are encouraging. The Large Hadron Collider experiments aren't gauged towards finding the Higgs boson itself, but rather the particles resulting from its decay. To that extent, the findings are encouraging. Two independent experiments found signs of such decay at the range of mass predicted by the Standard Models of physics.

Physicist Jack Gunion, the co-author of the Higgs Hunter's Guide, noted in a guest post at Discover that "the two experiments both see signals that exceed 2 sigma so that there is less than a 5% chance that they are simply statistical fluctuations." This is good news for the Standard Model, and suggests that CERN is close to finally finding the Higgs Boson.

Still, they haven't found it yet, so let's not pop the champagne corks. That said, they're probably close, and CERN hopes to have definitive findings before the end of 2012, one way or the other.